


Battle Wounds

by orphan_account



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-26
Updated: 2011-04-26
Packaged: 2018-01-02 15:19:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,282
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1058349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Now that he's working with Sherlock, John finds himself the doctor on the scene when bullets start flying around London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Battle Wounds

  


It wasn’t until several minutes after the sound of the shot being fired that John realised the bullet had found its target. He wouldn’t have even noticed as soon as he did if he hadn’t knocked into Sherlock and caught the wash of pain over his face.

“Sherlock are you hit?” he asked, his eyes quickly passing over his friend.

“Fine,” Sherlock said. His back stiffened as he glanced over at the officers milling about at the scene. “Just a scratch. Totally… not fatal.”

John frowned up at him. “No,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a totally non-fatal gunshot wound.”

He lightly placed his hand on Sherlock back and guided him over to an idling panda car.

“No police cars,” Sherlock insisted.

“Just, sit on the boot,” John encouraged, trying to lead a reluctant Sherlock to the car. “And come on. Off with the coat.”

Sherlock leaned against the car and stared at John.

“Off with it, or I'll cut it off,” John threatened. “Do you want to see if I’m kidding?”

Sherlock stalled only a few moments longer before gingerly pulling his coat off, hissing through his teeth as it slid off of his left arm. John watched him expectantly, staring at him until he unbuttoned his jacket and shucked it as well.

The bullet had hit him on his arm just below his shoulder, spreading a large patch of red across the fabric of his shirt.

“That’s knackered, mate. Sorry,” John said. “It’s gotta go. Come on.”

Sherlock grumbled quietly John worked at the buttons, careful to avoid brushing the shirt against his arm. Sherlock hissed again, causing John to look up sharply.

“I’m fine,” Sherlock said before John had a chance to ask anything.

Nodding, John pulled the shirt off of Sherlock’s shoulders and leaned back slightly to get a full look at everything.

“Right, might need stitches. Let me just…” He turned round, and seeing a uniformed officer, snapped his fingers several times in his direction. “Oy. Gloves. Got ‘em?” he asked.

The officer gave John a puzzled look before spotting the state Sherlock was in and quickly nodded, reaching into one of the small pouches on his belt. He handed John the neoprene gloves before reaching for the radio on his shoulder.

“Should a call for an ambulance?” he asked.

John pulled the gloves onto his hands before moving to inspect the area. “Shouldn’t need, no,” he said. “Steri-Strips from the med kid ought to do it, if you’d be so kind.”

The constable nodded again and stepped up to the front of the car to grab the small medical kit from under the seat.

“You sure, sir?” he asked as he handed it over.

“Open it?” asked John, nodding at it.

“Please, it’s just a scratch,” Sherlock insisted with a stiff voice. “You’re wasting your time.”

“You don’t shut up, and I’ll stitch your bloody mouth shut once we’re home,” John said. He picked out one of the strips from the kit and pushed the wound closed with his fingertips. “Sorry,” he said lightly.

“It’s fine,” Sherlock insisted.

John just shook his head and placed two more butterfly stitches over the wound on Sherlock’s arm before securing a thick gauze square over the top.

“Right, then,” he said as he pulled off his gloves and glanced around for a safe place to dispose them. “Get your clothes on, and I’ll find us a cab.”

He left Sherlock just long enough to bag his gloves and find a cab before returning to help bundle Sherlock into the back. Almost as soon as John was in the cab and had the door shut, Sherlock threw himself rather dramatically into the seat cried out loudly enough to startle the cabbie quite badly.

“Oh, shut up,” John muttered.

By now, Sherlock was clutching at his arm, just underneath where the bullet had grazed him.

“I got shot, and it _hurts_!” Sherlock shouted. “Why haven’t you done anything for that?”

John bit his tongue for a few moments. “You got scratched. You said so yourself,” he reminded him.

“And I could _die_ , as you so cleverly pointed out,” Sherlock said. “You’re just going to sit there and let me die.”

John considered this. “Yeah,” he said. “Then it might actually be quiet enough round the flat for me to sleep through the night. Sounds like a plan to me.”

Sherlock glared at him, and then fell mercifully silent for the duration of the ride home.

It wasn’t even like Afghanistan. In Afghanistan, even though supplies were low, they were still present.

No. Nothing like Afghanistan. It was like a really bad episode of Casualty. He had nothing but the clothes on his back and his training to keep the man under his hands from dying.

He also had the small graces of the Thames in the winter. The same freezing water that was making his hands shake uncontrollably was also sending Detective Inspector Lestrade into the early stages of hypothermia, and – ironically – keeping him alive.

Of course, it wouldn’t be keeping him alive for long if the damn paramedics didn’t show up soon. John ignored Sherlock verbally abusing whoever was on the other end of the phone line and focused on keeping the pressure on Lestrade’s thigh. Mercifully, the femoral artery hadn’t been completely severed, but all that meant was that he would take a few more minutes to bleed out.

“Where the fuck are they?” John shouted when he realised that Lestrade had become unresponsive. Now it was starting to feel exactly like Afghanistan.

“Sherlock, I need you over here now!”

Sherlock growled into his phone before shooting a glance in John’s direction.

“You know what you’re doing. I’m busy,” he told him.

If John’s hands weren’t busy at that moment, he was certain that he’d be using them to throttle Sherlock. He didn’t care if Sherlock was playing up whatever self-diagnosis he’d settled on this week; some things were just universally thick-headed things to say.

“Goddamnit, Sherlock!” John shouted. “Would you just fucking listen to me for once and get your arse over here?”

To John’s complete surprise, Sherlock had been startled into complying and even knelt down on the wet ground next to John.

“Keep him conscious,” John said as he tried to get a reading on Lestrade’s pulse.

“I thought that was head wounds,” Sherlock said.

John didn’t even deign to glare at him. “Do it!” he shouted. “He’s bradycardic because _someone_ decided that we all needed to go for a swim in January. If bleeding out doesn’t kill him, that might.”

For a moment, Sherlock looked as though he was going to argue that point, but instead developed a well-timed sense of self-preservation. He seemed to search the air in front of him for a moment, as though hoping to find some sort of explanation for what he should be doing, before rather unexpectedly giving Lestrade a back-hand slap to the face.

“Don’t do that!” John snapped.

“I’m not the doctor!” Sherlock shouted back. “You didn’t tell me what else to do.”

Luckily, John didn’t have to, as he was instead distracted by flashing lights up on the Embankment. He let the paramedics take over, and let a member of a second team check him for any injuries of his own. Later in A+E, after being told that he needed to be kept for observation, word had reached him that Lestrade was stable. Even with Sherlock screaming at nurses somewhere else on the ward, John managed his first dreamless sleep in over a year.

Curse Sherlock and his goddamn gazelle-like ability to leap over things he had no business being able to leap over. He’d cleared three garden fences with ease before John managed to pull himself over the first. Catching up with the mad bastard wasn’t going to happen until the chase was well and truly over, but John was determined to keep at it regardless.

“John!” Sherlock called out from someone’s garden, somewhere John couldn’t see.

“Shut up, I’m coming!” John called back as he pulled himself over the second fence.

Also pulling himself over the fence was the very man they were after. John hadn’t expected him to have doubled back, and Dennison apparently hadn’t expected to see John still in the chase. The two men fell off the fence in a tangle of limbs and the ringing of gunfire.

John hit the ground hard with a pain that was far too great to have just been the impact from the relatively short fall. He tried to catch the breath that had been knocked out of him, knowing that their man had to be caught, but the breath didn’t come easily.

He needed to sit up; get in a better position to force his lungs to work. He moved his arms out to push himself up, triggering a white hot pain through the right side of his body.

Knowing what he was going to find, John looked to his right just as the initial shock of too many injuries at once began to wear off. It was beyond not fair, and he was drowning in the irony of it.

“John!” Sherlock shouted as he vaulted over the fence. “Did you—?”

He ran another two paces before noticing John, choking back sobs with his face in the grass, his left hand pressed weakly against his shoulder.

“What’d you let him do that for?” Sherlock demanded. He looked in the direction Dennison had ran, and after a brief moral crisis, forced his attention to John.

“Fuck you,” John managed. He’d much rather die alone than with Sherlock standing around and insulting him.

He didn’t even notice Sherlock drop down to the ground beside him, his hands held out as though they might work out what to do on their own. Ultimately, they turned out to be just as clueless about the matter as he was.

“Should—should I try to remove the bullet?” Sherlock asked.

John had never heard him sound so uncertain, and it terrified him. What terrified him even more, however, was what Sherlock was proposing to do.

“You stick your fingers in me, and I’ll fucking kill you,” John told him. “Or I’ll die trying.”

“No,” Sherlock agreed. “Right. Why?”

John didn’t even bother holding back his sobs this time. If Sherlock was going to be a useless sod, he’d have to take care of it himself. How, he had no idea, since his shoulder had a hole in it and he was bleeding all over the place. He reached for his phone and through blurred eyes managed to dial 999 before throwing the device at Sherlock.

He ignored the abuse Sherlock flung at the operator, only able to hope that the man was familiar enough with the process to know how to place an emergency call at all.

John was fairly certain Sherlock actually was going to be the death of him.

He had to sit up. If Sherlock’s ignorance didn’t kill him, lying on the ground most certainly would. Elevate the area and control the bleeding. John managed to roll himself over so that he could use his relatively-good arm to push himself up. He screamed through the pain, deliberately overdoing it so that the operator would hear the severity of the situation and hopefully try to talk Sherlock into being useful.

It must have worked, because by the time he was leaning against the fence, Sherlock was back by his side and being mercifully quiet.

“I need a…” he started as he looked around his person, his eyes falling resentfully on his scarf hanging out of his coat pocket. “This’ll have to do.”

He balled the scarf and pressed it to the sticky, red area of John’s right shoulder. John wanted to cry, not sure if it was from the pain of yet another destroyed shoulder, or Sherlock managing the situation.

“I hate you,” John said.

“No you don’t,” Sherlock argued, balancing his phone between his ear and shoulder as he tried to resituate the makeshift bandage.

“I do,” John insisted. “And to prove it, I’m sending you on a first aid course. You suck at this.”

“I’m trying!” Sherlock insisted.

“Oh, god. If I die, I’m gonna kill you,” John said, trying to make it sound like a promise.

“You’re… fine,” Sherlock said.

“You’re lying,” John told him. He knew what Sherlock was trying to do, but he had to keep talking; had to keep focus. The minute he lost that, he really was dead.

“Yes, I’m lying,” Sherlock admitted. “One of us has to right now.”

“You’re rubbish at it,” John said. The pain in his shoulder was starting to feel distant and he could feel himself becoming far too tired. All familiar territory, and entirely unwelcome. “It’s a good thing you’re not a doctor.”

“No,” Sherlock agreed. “I think you’re right. Are you falling asleep? Don’t do that.”

“Don’t you dare slap me,” John said.

He could hear voices nearby, but couldn’t focus on them. It wasn’t until Sherlock was pulled away and new hands, hands that knew what they were doing, started touching his face. He let himself drift now that he knew he was in the safety of skilled professionals, ignoring everything around him. It wasn’t until he saw Sherlock standing over him that he even realised he’d been moved onto a stretcher.

“At least you’ll match now,” Sherlock offered.

John groaned and waved his hand vaguely. “Someone do me a favour and strangle him,” he said.

No one did. John made a note to remember to do it himself as soon as he had use of both his hands again.

  



End file.
